Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Center or the National Research Council. The paper
has not been reviewed by the National Research Council.

I come immediately to the core of my argument.
There are two--not one, not many--school reform movements in the United
States. One is essentially corporate in character, especially in its ephemeral
existence beyond place. The other is very much of specific place and people
and, by comparison, might be likened to a cottage industry. From here on
out, I shall refer to the first of these movements as school reform and
to the second as school renewal.

The language of the former is clearly for reform, with its traditional
connotations: something has gone wrong and is to be corrected, as with
delinquent boys incarcerated in a reform school. Prescriptions are given;
corrective actions are to be taken; faceless people in faceless agencies
are holding clearly identifiable people accountable. Sometimes there is
a carrot, more often a stick or both carrot and stick. As with corporate
litany, "restructuring" and "systemic" are favorite words. The intent is
to bring all those recalcitrant entities out there into linear, well-managed
corporate culture--to franchise them in common goal, method, and outcome.
Thus, several rules of corporate culture in addition to ephemerality are
met: the growth imperative, hierarchy, linearity, and homogenization.**
Other corporate characteristics are perhaps less obvious but exacerbate
my anxiety about what we are increasingly witnessing as school reform:
a bottom line that essentially debases the nature of education and a zeitgeist
that dehumanizes.

The language of school renewal, by contrast, is multidimensional, relatively
free of good guys and bad guys and (to the frustration of many reformers)
of ends, means, and outcomes linearity. The language and the ethos are
of the people around and especially in schools acquiring the efficacy and
developing the collaborative mechanisms necessary to better schools. A
growing literature of satisfying experiences emphasizing the role of teachers,
principals, and parents includes references to schools as gardens, students
as plants to be nourished, and the importance of appropriate nutrients.
Indeed, the word coming to mind to best describe both the language and
the ethos is ecological.

*Title adapted from Benjamin R. Barber,
Jihad vs. McWorld (New York: Times Books, 1995). See also Robert
Grossman's illustration for the cover of The Nation, September 21,
1992. (Because of space limitation, reference notes and other documentation
are omitted, except for a few I consider essential.)

**It is necessary that I recognize here
my borrowing directly from Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), pp. 129-138.

Differing Rhetoric,
Differing Paradigms

When I first posited this two-movement thesis of school reform and school
renewal a decade ago (at a conference in Princeton hosted by the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), it was quickly shot down.
There are many, each competing for attention and resources, I was told.
Let's decide on which to place our money, get on with reform, and get beyond
pedantic, semantic trivialities.

It is dangerous not to recognize the emergence of these two fundamentally
different paradigms and folly to push the messy local initiatives into
the tent of the neatly rational linear reform model. The latter assumes
a system of loosely connected parts. Reform is to effect a tighter connecting
of these parts so as to make of the whole a powerful instrument for the
achievement of national economic purpose.

The alignment of ends, means, and outcomes has narrowed and tightened
in the post-Nation At Risk era in comparison with what it was in the post-Sputnik
school reform era. At the 1965 White House Conference on Education, Vice
President Hubert H. Humphrey provided the impassioned rhetoric that tied
school reform to President Johnson's vision of the Great Society: This
nation will go down in history as the one that used its schools to deal
successfully with the problems of joblessness, poverty, inner-city slum
clearance, violence, and, indeed, world peace. If the soaring rhetoric
of H.H.H. has been surpassed, I am unaware of it. I was so moved that I
thought I could fly back to Los Angeles without benefit of an airplane.

The following morning, the workshop group of school folks I had left
three days before quizzed me eagerly about what had gone on in Washington.
I had great difficulty connecting anything I had heard with their problems,
such as dealing with students' diversity and individuality. Later, educators
such as these and academicians were able to take advantage monetarily of
the provisions in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that
recognized a broad scope of need and sought to bypass the recognized rigidity
of state departments of education.

The 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education
narrowed the focus, using military language in charging our schools with
instrumentality in ensuring our nation's leadership in the global economy.
Local districts and states were to carry out the crusade. Theodore Sizer
wrote a little piece in reply that would have been hilarious had it not
been so tragically true. There was to be no mounting of the necessary weaponry,
he contended. The countryfolk would do battle with their customary shovels,
hoes, and rakes. State-appointed commissions wrote thousands of pages of
reports, selecting carefully and repeating endlessly the same data and
horror stories designed to arouse the populace from its perceived over-satisfaction
and lethargy regarding the schools. A self-fulfilling rhetorical prophecy
of school failure was engendered and tied to a narrative of dire consequences
for what Neil Postman refers to as the god of economic utility. The 1986
report of the National Governors' Association thankfully overestimated
the crass appeal to the people of the slogan, "Better schools mean better
jobs."

As an aside, I note that there have been no glowing commendations of
the schools for the role they might have been presumed to play in our present
enviable position in the world economy and our low rate of unemployment.
For our schools to be so credited would be a blow to the political education
industry that has grown up around inflating the image of their failure.
Whereas the cancer industry is sustained by the continued presence of cancer
in the populace, the vote-getting appeal of school reform is sustained
by downplaying the successes and raising the decibels of hyperbole regarding
the shortcomings of our schools.

The language of school renewal is short on ends-means connections. It
is far more contextual. High on the list of teachers' perceived problems
are lack of student interest in learning and the parental support they
believe to be a corollary of success in school, particularly at the high
school level. High on parents' lists are the behavioral problems and threats
to safety in the school environment and lack of attention to the needs
of their own children. The rhetoric of school failure pumps up whatever
dissatisfaction parents have with their local school but rarely aligns
them with politically driven reform initiatives such as President Bush's
America 2000 or President Clinton's Goals 2000.

Several years ago, I set out to check the penetration of post-Nation
At Risk politically driven school reform proposals. At the time, Education
Secretary Lamar Alexander was busily signing up whole cities for the America
2000 train. A newsletter repeating the several goals and listing the new
passengers reached my desk regularly. I rarely have seen a school reform
initiative so accompanied by hype. During a year of addressing educational
conferences of teachers, administrators, parents, and various public officials,
I asked the question, "How many of you know enough about America 2000 to
be able to describe some of its substance to persons sitting beside you?"
Out of audiences of several hundred people, I never had a show of more
than four or five hands.

Until a couple of years ago, I engaged in one-day seminars, spread over
nearly three years, with superintendents of schools in virtually all the
regions of the United States. During seminars, I sought to find out whether
they perceived post-Nation At Risk school reform efforts to have helped
their districts. There was no enthusiasm. Somewhat to my dismay, I discovered
that most considered their local efforts to have been hindered rather than
helped. Less than 10 percent of the approximately 450 superintendents with
whom I met perceived their districts to have been better off because of
the national reform effort--mostly because of some additional money received.

This chasm between local enthusiasm and the federal and state crusade
for world-class schools has frustrated political and business leaders.
The relatively high rating many parents give their local schools compared
to the low rating they give the schooling enterprise has been passed off
by some critics as apathy. There has been plenty of blame to spread around,
and nearly all of it has fallen on groups in or near the schools--teachers,
administrators and, the recurring villains, teacher educators. It is past
time to abandon the villain theory and its time-worn accusations and to
seriously consider the proposition that school reform has largely failed
because the oft-repeated model of change is wrong-headed. This should not
in any way draw our attention away from the shortcomings of our schools,
but it just might lead to more productive strategies.